Bambu Lab Discontinues PETG Basic: Implications for 3D Printer Operators

Bambu Lab has discontinued their PETG Basic filament.

The company offers a wide selection of materials for their several popular 3D printer models, and even includes a color swatch with every shipment to encourage sales.

Currently they offer:

• 14 colors of PLA
• 2 ASA
• 2 ABS
• 1 PC
• 1 TPU
• 1 PET
• 1 PAHT
• 2 PA
• 7 Reinforced
• 3 Support
• 3 version of PETG

Of the PETG, they offer Basic, Translucent and CF versions. However, if you look in the fine print on the PETG Basic page, you’ll see this curious statement:

“Note: PETG Basic has been discontinued due to product optimization and will not be restocked once sold out.”

If this holds, then they would offer only the translucent and CF PETG materials.

This seems very strange, because PETG is known to be one of the most popular materials around. In a discussion with Polymaker in 2022, they revealed that PETG has seen a surge of use since the pandemic.

PETG is in many applications better than PLA. It’s just about as easy to print, yet has a higher glass transition temperature making it ideal for more applications. It also looks better in many cases.

Why is Bambu Lab ceasing distribution of PETG? It’s quite unclear, and they haven’t explained this publicly. A large company discontinuing what is almost certain a popular material is puzzling.

Speculation: perhaps they have trouble sourcing sufficient quantities of PETG. Remember that Bambu Lab does not make the filaments internally; instead they relabel products made by filament manufacturers. It may also be that Bambu Lab was not satisfied with the quality of the product from the manufacturer and are pausing sales until they can identify a new supplier.

For Bambu Lab 3D printer operators, this will no doubt cause some grief. The primary benefit of purchasing materials from Bambu Lab directly is that the spools are chipped, and their equipment can instantly recognize the material type and color. That makes operations simpler and more reliable. There’s no more, “oops, I selected the wrong AMS slot” errors.

That is, unless you intend on using PETG materials.

To be clear, Bambu Lab’s equipment still supports and prints PETG quite well. It’s just that you’ll have to obtain the PETG spools from another source — and the spools will not be chipped. That makes the workflow just a bit worse. Many operators already use third party materials in Bambu Lab equipment. For them, this change won’t make any difference at all. It affects only those who were buying PETG materials directly from Bambu Lab.

This decision could open up the possibility of third parties making a push for their PETG materials: “Try us, you’ll like it!”

That could be quite important because most operators tend to keep buying from the same source. This situation is a huge opportunity for some PETG sellers to pick up a large number of apparently abandoned Bambu Lab PETG buyers, perhaps for the long term.

Perhaps in the future Bambu Lab will restart PETG sales, but we don’t know the reasons why they stopped and whether those conditions will disappear in the future.

For now, PETG operators will have to obtain their material from other sources. The good news is that there are plenty of excellent options.

Via Bambu Lab